Did you know that countless websites receive millions of website visitors without paying for advertising? Instead of ads, they focus their efforts on SEO, specifically on Google, since that’s who handles most of the world’s web traffic.

Search engine optimization is the ideal long-term strategy for businesses and websites looking for a steady stream of traffic every day, week, and month. But as you get started on your SEO journey, you’ll realize there’s a lot to consider.

For example, all of your efforts to rank higher might be thwarted if you don’t realize that you have toxic backlinks pointing to your website. These unnatural backlinks can be doing more harm than good and should be removed right away.

But how do you know if you have low-quality backlinks, and how do you deal with them if you do? Keep reading below to learn more about backlinks for SEO.

The Importance of Your Backlinks Strategy

As you get started with SEO, you’ll learn very quickly that backlinks are the most important component of your marketing strategy. But why is that?

Backlinks are links on other websites that point back to your website. Each backlink that you have essentially acts like a vote, telling Google that your website is trustworthy and reputable.

The more links you get, the higher-quality your site must be. And so good, healthy backlinks will improve your search rankings for your desired keywords.

You can spend your time trying to write guests post for other websites. Or you can learn how to get backlinks the easy way, with reputable SEO professionals.

What are Toxic Backlinks?

Not every backlink is a good backlink. Toxic or spam backlinks are those that look unnatural and come from low-quality websites. Google can tell if a link is bad or spammy and may penalize websites that have spammy backlinks.

But how do you get them in the first place? Oftentimes, other websites and SEO experts will intentionally send toxic backlinks your way to lower your ranks so they can get to the top.

It’s a terrible practice and is completely unfair, but is fairly common. Other times, you may just fall victim to bot attacks that send spam links to many different websites. In either case, they aren’t good for your SEO efforts.

Removing Toxic Backlinks

To remove spammy backlinks, you first need to identify them. You can do this with paid SEO tools like Moz or Ahrefs. They’ll show you your backlinks and rate them based on how spammy they look toward search engines.

Once you know which links you want to remove, you’ll turn to Google for help. Specifically, you’ll want to log into Google Search Console.

You can use their Disavow Link tool to request Google to ignore as many bad links as you want. You can include the specific link, or just type in the domain, and it will block all links from that domain.

It takes a little bit of time for the links to get disavowed and for your rankings to recover afterward.

Investing in Better Backlinks

Everyone wants more backlinks so they can climb the search rankings. But Google penalizes those who resort to low-quality, spammy, toxic backlinks.

Only those with high-quality links will win the SEO game, so make sure to focus your efforts on creating the right content and website relationships.

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